MEAT MARKET OWNER BANKS ON ‘BIG JOHN’ REPUTATION

CARLSBAD 
When Big John Haedrich opened his butcher shop here in 1979, he was 50 years old and retirement was on the horizon.

“I thought I’d keep it 10 years and retire,” he recalled. “It developed a little bit differently than I thought it would.”

Now 84, Haedrich is more involved than ever at Tip Top Meats, the largest — if not the last — corner butcher shop left in North County. He shows up seven days a week, maneuvering his 6-foot, 6-inch frame through the European delicatessen and market that he has nurtured and staffed for 34 years.

He is modest about his hours — “I don’t work as hard anymore,” he told me when we met on Thursday — but in reality, few work as hard as Haedrich has for decades on end.

“I used to be here at 5:30 a.m., but I don’t do that now,” he said. “I get here at 7 and go home at 9 o’clock at night. I want to be here, I want to enjoy this. I couldn’t live without it. I have a place to go every day, I have a mission.”

Those who have encountered Big John at his shop, or witnessed him bidding on 4-H animals at the fair, recognize him by his height and massive hands and deeply accented voice, filled with the tones of the East German village where he grew up.

On Thursday, as we sat at a table in the deli, Haedrich recalled escaping East Germany as the Soviet blockade descended on Berlin in 1949. Four years later, he would earn his master’s degree at the Butcher School of Berlin.

“I saw the communists and I didn’t want to be living there,” Haedrich said, recalling Nikita Khrushchev’s fiery Cold War overtures in the late 1950s. “My father said to me, ‘If you fight, fight for The Star-Spangled Banner.’ I’ll never forget that. For freedom and free enterprise — they didn’t have it over there at the time.”

In a trade paper for butcher shops he found an invitation for young, enterprising butchers to make their way to the U.S.

He opened his first shop in Glendale in 1967 and, a decade later, was driving through Carlsbad when he first set eyes on the 2.7 acres that would become Tip Top Meats.

Today, Haedrich employs 46 people, from the butcher who has been with him for more than 30 years to all three of his “superstar grandchildren.”

“It took me a little time to organize the whole thing, with plans, building, contacts, suppliers. We started from scratch, on an anthill, so to speak — there was nothing here,” he recalled.

There are essentially three parts to the business, which is built around Haedrich’s expertise as a butcher.

Besides the sausage-making operation, which turns out 3,500 pounds a week, he sells cuts of beef and pork from the German-style market, and serves up 600 meals a day in the deli, which was packed at lunchtime Thursday.

Haedrich said the menu prices haven’t changed since 2010, and he seems right at home in the dining room, where I found him poring over seating charts with a contractor last week, a granddaughter reading over his shoulder.

He has been attending the San Diego County Fair since 1993 to bid on the livestock brought to market each summer by 4-H and FFA students around the region.

The animals from the fair are not USDA-certified, so he cannot sell them from his market. But every summer, he spends thousands of dollars to support the county’s young farmers, and then donates the meat to needy families at Camp Pendleton.

If you keep an ear out for Big John at the deli, there are two things you might overhear.

The first is him bragging about his grandchildren, naturally.

The second would be him lamenting the lost art of the corner butcher shop — a loss, no doubt, precipitated by the demise of independent food markets, as well as the cultural movement toward vegetarianism.

“Go next door,” he said, referring to the big-box membership store looming just east of Haedrich’s market. “They have nice meat there, and they treat it like firewood.”

When a butcher is inexperienced, he said, there is no art or appreciation in the cuts, and there also tends to be a lot of waste — something Haedrich cannot abide.

“I have made the payroll for 46 years. I produce jobs,” Haedrich said. “That is my only pride I have, my only bragging point.”